Skill Credits Here's an idea to help with a couple of issues.. Problem 1: Players joining the game late are at a severe disadvantage. This is made even worse by the fact that the open slot they're filling is most likely to be on the already-losing team. 10 minutes into the game, everyone else has gotten the initial $300, plus $1000 free from the 30 second tick, plus whatever else they've earned. A player joining the game 10 minutes late only gets the initial $300. It would make sense to at least compensate them for the 10 minutes of free money that everyone else got. Problem 2: Switching class mid-game could open up some interesting strategic options, but it's so costly that it's almost never going to be worth it. By switching classes you essentially throw away all the money that you spent on skills so far. Solution: Implement Skill Credits. These would be separate from cash, and only usable for buying skills. First upgrade costs 1 Skill Credit, and the second upgrade costs 2. Maybe 1 credit + $250 could also buy the second upgrade if you only have one credit left. When you join a game in progress, you start with some number of Skill Credits based on how long the game has been going. Maybe one every 2 minutes. This way new joiners aren't at quite as much of a disadvantage, and there's no way to exploit it. When you switch class, your skills are converted into Skill Credits so that you can reallocate them on the class you switch to. Probably subtract one or two to discourage frequent switching and prevent any tricks that exploit the slight difference in value between credits and cash. Having this penalty would also discourage people from switching to a different class temporarily just to spawn bots (gapshots), and I think that would be a good thing. More Offensive Spending Options When your skills are all upgraded, there aren't enough options for spending large amounts of cash in-game. You can buy juice repeatedly, spawn some bots, or upgrade base turrets. Spawning enough bots to consume a thousand or more cash takes a while, and it's boring. With some classes (sniper), it's not very useful, frequently less useful than being out in the field yourself. Buying juice is limited by the machine cooldowns, and some servers turn it off because having someone chain juice for half the game is sometimes seen as "lame". The quickest and easiest way to spend a lot of cash is to build lots of turrets. This is what a lot of people do, and it leads to some very defense-oriented games that just end up in overtime after half a match of stalemate against turrets. I think we need at least one more offensive spending option. Something that I think could counter heavy defensive spending (turtles!) while fitting in with the game theme would be the ability to spawn jackbots. Somewhere between $500-$1000 to spawn a jackbot seems reasonable. Turret Revamp Lazer Blazers aren't worth building. The first two levels are especially useless, and are practically just gifts to the enemy team if they're left that way. The same goes for Lv1 Longshot and Lv1 ShaveIce. Lv3 Rockit Turrets are too strong. They have both incredible durability and incredible firepower, especially when hacked. The ideal defensive setup for crossfire or blitz is to just have a ton of Lv3 rockits, maybe with one Lv3 Shaveice. I think the Rockits need to lose some firepower and take a more specialized role as being tough to kill. Lazer Blazers should get a total revamp to make them competitive with Rockit turrets. Rockits: tough to break. Lazers: deadly. The Lv3 Lazer Blazer isn't necessarily BAD.. it's similar in cost and effectiveness (deadlier but more fragile) to a Lv1 Rockit. The problem is that it can't be upgraded any further! I suggest making the Lv1 Lazer Blazer similar to the current Lv3, maybe a little weaker, for somewhere around $100-150. Then add higher Lv2 and Lv3 upgrades that are competitive with the same level Rockit Turrets. A little cheaper, a little more fragile, and a little more deadly.
I like the skill credits idea. It'd definitely adds flexibility in switching classes. I think there should be more variety of bots you can spawn. Most of the bots besides gapshot are designed to disable or kill players. I'd like to see more bots designed to push lanes or take out turrets, it would really promote more offensive strats.
I think skill credits could work for switching classes, but not for late joiners. Reason why is because these people are late, they are going to need to keep up with the rest of the players that have a lot of cash. What do people spend influx of cash on? Annihilator, bots and turrets. Those are things that skill credits cannot buy and are indeed necessary to help the team and not be just a useless pawn/target. Lazer Blazer: everything I agree on... nothing needs said... Rockit: perhaps that could work... i like the idea. Basically you're saying more armor, but less dps, right? I would like to add, that maybe we should get the ability to add some sort of armor such as spikes to these turrets? Example: assassin runs in and melee all the turrets in juice-mode but with little repercussions. Perhaps if there are spikes on it, that would avoid using melee attacks and allow team to progress along with the assassin to bring it down? Basically, these turrets go down so fast and with such a large investment that they almost aren't even worth building until maybe late game? Even in late game,unless you have 2 supports to help hack EVERY turret you have.. the assassin just rips through it all. Jackbots are a nice idea on things to spend on btw... kinda like the Annihilator. edit: You mentioned about having lots of cash towards the end and something to spend it on. Well, like my previous idea about armor-like spikes, what about adding armor to ANY turret with a leveling type system? Level 1 adds XX hp, Level 2 adds XX hp, Level 3. This would prevent some juicers (assassins) from taking down EVERY turret all in one go. ORRR just add resistance vs melee attacks. Resistance towards melee could work, yea??
I think the turrets should drain juice faster, in such a way that you could only destroy one turret in the time you have juice. One turret is all it might take to change the game, so it might work. Then again, there might be multiple turrets in the enemies base. So what about using the annihilator to take out a chunk of hp out of those turrets? These are just my two cents though.
For the problem about credits: I'd say that if you join a game halfway, you get the amount of credit ticks right of the bat. So if you join 5 minutes in, you get 5*2*50 = 500 credits extra on top of the initial 300. Seems reasonable enough to me. About the class switching thing: maybe it'd be enough if you had the option to reclaim skills from a certain class for money. When you are on the class switching screen, you have a button for each class that removes all skills from that class and gives you a, say, 75-80% refund. No need to include a new type of currency and intuitive enough if you ask me.
